Nick Carter Stories No. 149, July 17, 1915: A Network of Crime; or, Nick Carter's Tangled Skein.Carter, Nicholas (House name)
General
Nick Carter Stories No. 149, July 17, 1915: A Network of Crime; or, Nick Carter's Tangled Skein.
Carter, Nicholas (House name)
Detective and mystery stories, American -- Periodicals; Popular literature -- Periodicals
Finally German scientists worked out an accurate system of facial
measurements compiled into an elaborate table, by the use of which faces
can be faithfully reconstructed over skulls. To date little has been
done along this line in Europe. In America the first work in building up
faces of prehistoric man has just been completed by Miss Myra Warner,
clay-model artist, who has made a specialized study of this German
system in the art schools of the East.
Miss Warner was handed the three skulls by Doctor Charles W. M. Poynter,
professor of anatomy of the University of Nebraska. She was told nothing
about the origin of the skulls. She worked faithfully for months, and,
with the aid of the table of measurements, built up the three wonderful
faces. It was not until she had nearly finished that she discovered one
of the three to be a modern Indian type. Yet, without knowing she was
working on a modern Indian skull, by applying only her table of
measurements faithfully to the skull as she built the clay upon it, she
produced so characteristic an American Indian type that Doctor Poynter
declared the accuracy of her work on the other two skulls, equally
unknown to her, could by no means be called into question.
The cannibal cave-dweller type is that of which Mr. Gilder found remains
in sunken cave homes along the Missouri River. He has uncovered some
forty of these caves, and has established the fact that the inhabitants
belong to what is known as the “round-headed” branch of the human race.
Geologists believe the inhabitants of these caves thrived some three
thousand years ago.
But the chief interest in the reconstruction work at the University of
Nebraska attaches to the face that has been built over the skull of the
Loess man. In all, the fragments of but six skulls belonging to this
type are in existence to-day.
This extreme primitive type of man is believed to have stalked over the
wastes of North America before the glaciers plowed their great gorges
and before they deposited the Kansan drift and the Loess clay to build
the bluffs at the Missouri River. This man, low-browed and of little
brain capacity, lived contemporaneously with the mammoth or mastodon,
which he probably slew for food, if indeed he could wield a stone weapon
sharp enough and strong enough to pierce the thick hide.
And yet, now that the faces have been reconstructed, we find no close
resemblance to the ape type, as many of the most excitable scientists
have expected. “The truth is,” says Doctor Poynter, “if man sprang from
the same original stem as the ape, the ape branch sprang off so far back
in antiquity that none of the skulls of the missing links could possibly
be expected to withstand the weathering to the present day. No one will
ever find a skull that will carry man back even anywhere near the ape
days, and the remotest skull we can find is already very much a man’s.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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